Selected items digitized as part of the Music For Moderns: The Partnership of George Avakian and Anahid Ajemian exhibition.

Portions of this collection have been digitized and are available online.

George Mesrop Avakian (born 1919) is an American music producer, artist manager, writer, and educator best known for his work with artists such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, John Cage, Alan Hovhaness, Keith Jarrett, Sonny Rollins, his wife Anahid Ajemian, and many other musicians and composers. Violinist Anahid Ajemian (born 1924) specialized in performing new music as a soloist; with her sister, the pianist Maro Ajemian (1921-1978); and with the Composers String Quartet. The George Avakian and Anahid Ajemian papers (1908-2013) document the careers and lives of the producer and violinist through personal and professional correspondence; published and unpublished writings and speeches; contracts and other business papers; scores; clippings; photographs; awards; posters; and visual art. The bulk of the collection consists of correspondence, writings, and photographs illustrating George Avakian's career as a recording producer and artist manager.

Biographical/historical information

George Mesrop Avakian (born 1919) is an American music producer, artist manager, writer, and educator best known for his work with artists such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, John Cage, Alan Hovhaness, Keith Jarrett, Sonny Rollins, his wife Anahid Ajemian, and many other musicians and composers.

Avakian was born in Armavir, Armenia, the oldest of three children of Mesrop Avakian. His brother was the film director, editor, and photographer Aram Avakian (1926-1987). The Bolshevik revolution forced his family to immigrate to the United States in 1923, and they settled in New York City.

Avakian attended the Horace Mann School for Boys in Riverdale, the Bronx, and entered Yale University in 1937 to pursue an English degree. In New Haven, he joined a local group of jazz enthusiasts centered around Marshall Stearns, a jazz writer and collector who later founded the Institute of Jazz Studies. Avakian soon became an expert on recorded jazz in an era when very little information about the music was published.

Aware that much of the recorded jazz of the 1920s and early 1930s was no longer available for purchase and study, Avakian envisioned a new way of recording and releasing the music on record using the same “album” format used for classical recordings in the 78-rpm era: multi-disk sets with extensive, well-researched annotations to supply the listener with information about the musicians and the music's historical context. After writing letters to several record companies outlining the idea, he was invited by Decca Records in 1939 to produce Chicago Jazz, a set of new recordings by Chicago musicians led by Eddie Condon.

Inspired by the Decca release, John Hammond suggested to the American Record Company that they hire Avakian in 1940, while he was still a student. (The company renamed itself Columbia Records around the same time.) He was assigned to search the company's warehouse for deleted and never-released masters and create reissue packages for them, resulting in the Columbia Hot Jazz Classics series.

In 1941, Avakian was drafted into the U.S. Army. After being stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia and receiving specialized training at Harvard University, Avakian served in the Pacific from 1944 to 1946. During his tour of duty he traveled to New Guinea, took part in the landings in Leyte and Mindanao in the Philippines, and served in the occupation forces in Japan. During his time there, he visited the city of Hiroshima several days after the first atomic bomb was dropped; he wrote an essay, never published, about the experience.

Avakian continued his jazz writing and producing career during his military service. While stationed in Boston he produced a radio broadcast for the Office of War Information, and in the Pacific he wrote articles on jazz published by Down Beat, Jazz magazine, Hot Jazz Booklets, and Mademoiselle. After the war, Avakian continued to write for magazines, and he expanded into teaching in 1948 when he taught one of the first academic jazz history courses at New York University. That same year, Avakian collaborated with Walter Schaap on an English translation and expansion of Charles Delaunay's Hot Discography, the first significant catalog of existing jazz records.

Following his discharge in 1946, Avakian immediately returned to Columbia, where he resumed production of the Hot Jazz Classics series, as well as the Special Editions and Archives series. Within a few years his mandate and opportunities became almost unlimited. In 1948, he was appointed head of the International department, overseeing the production of new foreign recordings, as well as the domestic issue of recordings by foreign subsidiaries. It was through this job that he met and produced Edith Piaf and Charles Aznavour.

In 1948, Avakian played a key role in pushing Columbia to develop and adopt the new technology of the 33 1/3-rpm long-playing record. He issued the first 100 popular albums in the format, making Columbia the leader in firmly establishing the microgroove record as a primary vehicle for music retailing for the next four decades.

In 1952, he was appointed the first director of the newly-formed Popular LP department, in addition to his International department duties. This department produced jazz artists as well as popular singers and Broadway cast recordings. Among the many artists Avakian signed and produced at Columbia during the 1950s were Dave Brubeck, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Ravi Shankar, Johnny Mathis, Rita Reys, Erroll Garner, and Buck Clayton.

Avakian was innovative in other ways as well: he made Columbia the first major company to record live jazz and popular music, releasing Benny Goodman's 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall, and recording Lionel Hampton, Harry James, and Louis Armstrong live. From 1956 until 1963, Avakian produced several cornerstone albums recorded live at the Newport Jazz Festival, including Ellington At Newport (1956) and the companion album to the film Jazz On A Summer's Day (1958). He was also one of the first producers of popular music to fully embrace multitrack recording and tape editing techniques, overdubbing Louis Armstrong in 1955 and overdubbing and editing the Miles Davis album Miles Ahead in 1957.

Avakian was one of the co-founders of the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) in 1957. He later served as president of the association from 1966 to 1967.

In March 1958, Avakian left Columbia and became vice president in charge of New York operations for World Pacific Records. He remained only a few months before departing to cofound Warner Brothers Records. While there, Avakian discovered the comedian Bob Newhart, signing him and producing his Grammy-winning album, The Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart. He also signed and produced the Everly Brothers and Bill Haley and the Comets for the label.

Avakian moved to RCA Records in 1960, where he produced Sonny Rollins, Benny Goodman, Paul Desmond, and Gary Burton, among others. He accompanied Goodman on his tour of the Soviet Union in 1962, the first tour of the country by an American jazz band, and produced the first jazz album ever recorded there, a live concert. Avakian left RCA around 1964.

In the early 1960s, Avakian began to independently produce and manage artists, including the Orchestra U.S.A. ensemble, the singer/songwriter Bob Morrison, and the saxophonist Charles Lloyd, arranging a deal for him with Atlantic Records, and booking and managing domestic and foreign tours for him from 1965 to 1969. Avakian also arranged for the Lloyd quartet to make the first tour by a small American jazz group in the Soviet Union in 1967, and recorded the group there as well. It was through Lloyd that Avakian met the group's pianist, Keith Jarrett. He began managing Jarrett, launching his performance and recording career on the Columbia, Atlantic, Impulse, and ECM labels.

In addition to his production of many Broadway cast recordings, Avakian notably involved himself in two theater projects. In 1947, he arranged for a group of musicians under the leadership of the saxophonist Eddie Barefield to perform incidental music for the play A Streetcar Named Desire during its Philadelphia and Broadway runs. In 1965, he was an associate producer of the first Off-Broadway revival of Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock, and personally financed the recording of the cast album.

Avakian worked hard to foster intercultural exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. In addition to the landmark Benny Goodman and Charles Lloyd tours, he was the first to record Soviet and American artists together (Pavel Lisitsian of the Bolshoi Opera and pianist Maro Ajemian, for New York Records in 1957). In 1960, he attempted to arrange a performance in Moscow by Maro Ajemian of Aram Khatchaturian's music, conducted by the composer. In 1971 and 1972, he assisted the Duke Ellington and the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis orchestras in planning their Soviet visits, and he befriended many Russian musicians, composers, and writers, such as Leonid Pereverzev, Oleg Lundstrem, and Valery Ponomarev. Avakian also sponsored the first performance by Soviet musicians in the United States (at the Village Gate in 1988), and arranged for the Branford Marsalis Quartet to play at the Moscow International Jazz Festival, the debut of American performers at that event, in 1990. For his life-long efforts, the Soviet Composers Union successfully pushed for him to receive the Order of Lenin, the former Soviet Union's highest honor, in 1990.

Avakian's other honors include the Knight of Malta (1984); the Down Beat Lifetime Achievement Award (2000); the prestigious French jazz award, the Django d'Or (2006); the French rank of Commandeur des Arts et Lettres (2008); the Trustees Award from the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences for contributions to the music industry worldwide (2009); and the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master award (2010).

In his retirement, Avakian continued to involve himself in independent recording productions for various artists, and, in the 1980s, managed two vocalists: Helen Merrill and Datevik Hovenasian. In the 1990s and 2000s, Sony Legacy consulted him for the reissues of several Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong albums. He also remained active in jazz research and writing, and discovered several previously-unknown Louis Armstrong compositions at the Library of Congress. In 1997, he produced performances and a recording of them by trumpeter Randy Sandke and other musicians.

Avakian met his wife, the violinist Anahid Ajemian (born 1924), in 1946 and the couple married in 1948. Ajemian's parents, like the Avakians, were Armenian expatriates who had moved to New York City in 1922. Ajemian's sister, Maro (1921-1978), was a pianist. Both sisters studied at the Institute of Musical Art (later the Juilliard School), launched their careers at Town Hall (in 1940 and 1946), and became interested in contemporary composers. Maro Ajemian performed the U.S. premiere of Aram Khatchaturian's piano concerto while she was still a student at Juilliard. In the early 1940s, she met the composer Alan Hovhaness, who was unknown at that time, and started performing his music. Through Hovhaness, the Ajemians met John Cage, Henry Cowell, Ernst Krenek, Lou Harrison, Wallingford Reigger, Carlos Surinach, and Ben Weber, several of whom wrote works for the duo. The Ajemians produced the first recordings of some of these compositions as well.

George Avakian personally financed and produced the first three albums by Hovhaness and Cage (unrelated to his jobs at Columbia) and, in 1958, presented The 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage at Town Hall, an event he also recorded and sold independently. The year before, Avakian and Ajemian produced a three-concert series at Town Hall titled Music For Moderns, featuring jazz musicians and modern composers on the same bill, a very unusual venture for its time. The concerts featured Anahid Ajemian, Dimitri Mitropoulos, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Mahalia Jackson, Chico Hamilton, the composers Virgil Thomson and Carlos Surinach, pianist William Masselos, violist Walter Trampler, and opera baritone Martial Singher, among others.

In the mid-1960s, at the request of Gunther Schuller, Ajemian and violinist Matthew Raimondi formed the Composers String Quartet, with the goal of featuring new music by American composers. The group rapidly became renowned and, sponsored by the U.S. State Department, toured the world in the late 1960s and 1970s, including countries such as China, India, and Sierra Leone, where no string quartet had ever performed before. It was the first group to record and regularly perform the string quartets of Elliott Carter. In 1975, it became Quartet-in-Residence at Columbia University. Avakian managed the quartet for several years in the late 1970s. It disbanded in 1999, and Anahid Ajemian continued to perform and teach at Columbia and the Juilliard School into the early 2000s.

Scope and arrangement

The George Avakian and Anahid Ajemian papers (1908-2013) document the careers and lives of the producer and violinist through personal and professional correspondence; published and unpublished writings and speeches; contracts and other business papers; scores; clippings; photographs; awards; posters; and visual art. The bulk of the collection consists of correspondence, writings, and photographs illustrating George Avakian's career as a recording producer and artist manager. The collection is arranged in three series: George Avakian Papers, Anahid and Maro Ajemian Papers, and Photographs.

The George Avakian papers date from 1924 to 2013. They detail his work producing, managing, or assisting a wide variety of musicians and recording artists; how he helped develop those artists' careers and art; the history of Avakian's careers at Columbia, World Pacific, Warner Brothers, and RCA Records; and his later projects as an independent manager and producer. Broadly, the papers show the development of the recording industry over the course of his career. They reveal the intertwined histories through personal and professional correspondence with recording artists or their management; correspondence with other record industry figures; published and unpublished articles, liner notes, essays, and historical accounts by Avakian; clippings; record company memos; business, recording, and production notes; touring information; contracts; publicity material; awards; posters; visual art; and photographs. Many of Avakian's writings were created with the intention of compiling a memoir of his career.

The Ajemian papers, dating from 1927 to 2011, document the lives and careers of George Avakian's wife, the violinist Anahid Ajemian, and her sister, the pianist Maro Ajemian. They contain biographical papers on both musicians; files on individual performances by the Ajemians as a duo and as solo artists; annotated scores; clippings; contracts; publicity material; letters from the composers Lou Harrison, Edgard Varèse, John Cage, and Alan Hovhaness; and obituaries and memorial tributes for Maro Ajemian. The scores include pieces for violin as well as compositions performed by the Composers String Quartet. Composers represented include Alan Hovhaness, Mel Powell, Wallingford Riegger, and Ben Weber.

The collection holds photographs dating from 1908 to 2012. They include images of Avakian or Ajemian with various musicians and colleagues, as well as candid, publicity, or performance photographs of those musicians, some never published. These include such figures as Louis Armstrong, Maro Ajemian, Dave Brubeck, the Composers String Quartet, Henry Cowell, Miles Davis, Eric Dolphy, Duke Ellington, Gil Evans, Benny Goodman, Alan Hovhaness, Keith Jarrett, Charles Lloyd, Johnny Mathis, Sonny Rollins, and Ravi Shankar. Also present are portraits of Avakian, some by Carl Van Vechten and William Gottlieb, and photographs of the Avakian and Ajemian families. Photographs of the 2004 Satchmo Summerfest appear only in digital form.

The George Avakian and Anahid Ajemian papers are arranged in three series:

Series I documents George Avakian's working and personal relationships with key 20th century musicians and artists, both American and foreign, from his time with major recording labels (1938 to the mid-1960s), to his independent work from the mid-1960s onward, to his later work on reissues of his classic productions. The series also gives evidence to his relationships with other key figures in the music and recording industries, such as producers, scholars, and writers, from the United States and other nations. These relationships are revealed through personal and business correspondence; business and management records; and Avakian's notes and writings throughout his career.

Other major topics covered in the papers include the development of Columbia Records during Avakian's time with the company; Avakian's World War II army service and his writings during it; the film Jazz On A Summer's Day; the Music for Moderns concert series; the Newport Jazz Festival; jazz in the Soviet Union; jazz history; and the commercial and technical development of the recording business. These files contain correspondence with producers, musicians, researchers, and journalists; Avakian's writings on the subjects; concert programs; and clippings. Smaller file sets contain correspondence with musicians, colleagues, and friends, and detail many recording or performance projects which Avakian produced or helped assemble from the 1970s to the 2010s.

As a general rule, artists and projects recorded for Columbia Records have little contemporaneous documentation in the collection (apart from photographs) because Avakian did not take his office files with him when he departed the company. Instead, Columbia projects are evidenced by correspondence regarding reissue projects, writings, clippings, and interview transcripts. Contemporary documents are more common for World Pacific, Warner Brothers, and RCA productions. Major portions of this series document work done on reissues of albums, not the original productions.

In addition to the descriptions below, further description of file contents can be found in the container list.

This series documents the careers of the Ajemian sisters, both as a duo and as solo artists. It holds annotated scores of works performed or recorded by the Ajemians or the Composers String Quartet; letters to the sisters and the Avakian family from Alan Hovhaness, Ernst Krenek, Lou Harrison, John Cage, and Edgard Varèse; performance-related files; and other topical files.

The scores hold pieces that in many cases were premiered or recorded by the Ajemians, and often contain performance notes. Consisting of both published editions and manuscript copies, they include works by Alan Hovhaness, Gunther Schuller, Wallingford Reigger, Dane Rudhyar, George Edwards, Toshio Mayazumi, Mel Powell, Ettorino Respighi, Seymour Shifrin, Carlos Surinach, Ben Weber, Anton Webern, Henry Weinberg, and Charles Whittenberg. They are arranged alphabetically by composer. The music by Hovhaness includes Suite for Violin, Piano, and Percussion; Three Visions of Saint Mesrop; Shatakh; Arshalouis; and Concerto No. 2 for Violin and String Orchestra (violin part only). The score for Reigger's Sonatina for Violin and Piano was used for the Ajemians' recording of the piece, and is autographed by Riegger. The score for Rudhyar's Three Poems contains 1993 correspondence between Anahid Ajemian and Maureen Nevins discussing the piece. Scores performed by the Composers String Quartet includes pieces by Mayazumi, Powell, Respighi, Weinberg, and Whittenberg.

Letters from Alan Hovhaness, Lou Harrison, and Ernst Krenek are filed under their names. All other letters, including those from John Cage and Edgard Varèse, are filed separately under letters. The letters from Alan Hovhaness to Maro Ajemian are substantial, dating from 1940 to 1950. They also contain 1991 letters from George Avakian describing the pivotal roles played by the Ajemian sisters and Dr. Elizabeth Gregory in the early stages of Hovhaness's career.

Other files in this series hold biographies of the Ajemians and the Composers String Quartet; clippings; programs; handbills; publicity material; and a scrapbook of clippings and programs regarding Maro Ajemian's early performances. They also evidence George Avakian's failed efforts to persuade the U.S. State Department to arrange a 1960 performance by Maro Ajemian in Moscow featuring the music of Aram Khachaturian (filed under Khachaturian); recordings by both Ajemians for CBS and RCA Records (filed under the respective companies); performances and tours of the Composers String Quartet from 1972 to 1983; the Diocese of the Armenian Church of America's honoring of Anahid Ajemian; remembrances of Maro Ajemian; and the scholarship established in her name at the Juilliard School.

Because George Avakian managed the Composers String Quartet for some years, most papers regarding it can be found in subseries I.A., Personal Papers. See also Alan Hovhaness, Lou Harrison, John Cage, and William Masselos in subseries I.A. Series III, Photographs, contains many images of the Ajemians and the Composers String Quartet.

Photographs in the form of prints, negatives, slides, and transparencies extensively illustrate the lives and careers of George Avakian and Anahid Ajemian. They contain high-quality portraits and informal pictures of Avakian dating from the late 1940s to 2010; photographs of Avakian with recording artists, musicians, and industry figures; promotional photographs of Anahid and Maro Ajemian dating from the mid-1940s to the 1970s; and many images of notable musicians and composers, some never published. They also contain informal photographs of the Avakians, their children, other family members, and friends.

A few of the photographs are reproductions, not prints. Many prints have the photographers' names noted on them, and some contain copyright notices. Some of the most historically important photographs, such as those of Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis, were taken by Avakian's brother, the photographer and filmmaker Aram Avakian, and are marked copyright Estate of Aram Avakian. Also among the photographers are Herman Leonard, Chuck Stewart, Otto Hess, and William Claxton. There are no photographs marked as being copyrighted by Columbia Records.

Photographs of George Avakian are in three divisions: solo or informal portraits; subjects; and Avakian with others. The solo portraits include images of him at Yale University, publicity shots during his time at Columbia Records (some by Carl Van Vechten), and portraits made for personal use from the 1980s to 2010. Avakian can also be seen in photographs throughout this series.

A general Musicians file holds group and individual photographs. See the container list for details.

Photographs of the Ajemian sisters are publicity and informal prints. They include images of Anahid Ajemian with, among others, Duke Ellington and Dimitri Mitropoulos; Ulysses Kay; Ben Weber; the Modern Jazz Quartet; Gunther Schuller and Lotte Lenya; and Sahan Arzruni. The Composers String Quartet file also holds photographs of Ajemian. Photographs of Maro Ajemian include solo publicity shots, as well as images with John Cage, William Masselos, and Alan Hovhaness.

Photographs of the Ajemians together feature them with artists such as Henry Cowell, Julius Katchen, Lotte Lenya, Gunther Schuller, and Alan Hovhaness. The Ajemian photographs also include images of family and friends during tours of the United States and Europe. Photographs taken during the Ajemians' debut tour of Europe include a print of the author Clement Richer, taken by Carl Van Vechten.

Some photographs of the 2004 Satchmo Summerfest are in digital form (in low and high resolution), and include an EXIF metadata file.

Administrative information

Source of acquisition

Purchased from George Avakian and Anahid Ajemian, 2013.

Processing information

Compiled by Matthew Snyder, 2014.

The CD-Rs that comprise the electronic components of the collection were forensically imaged for preservation.

Separated material

George Avakian and Anahid Ajemian audio collection, *L (Special) 14-06. Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound, The New York Public Library.